


running with my roots pulled up

by sidnihoudini



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-14
Updated: 2010-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidnihoudini/pseuds/sidnihoudini
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is nothing if not resilient, and the world may owe him a lot of things, but most of all, it owes him a few more minutes with his brother.  Spoilers for 5x22.</p>
            </blockquote>





	running with my roots pulled up

Ben is older than Dean remembers him, in all the ways that matter.

He’s chubbier, that influx of hormones just before he gains his last foot and a half, and Lisa gives him twenty bucks a week just to mow the lawn and keep the soda cans out of his bedroom.

When Dean was fifteen, he burnt his hand making Sam spaghetti on a heat-happy stovetop somewhere in Albuquerque, and took down his first Wendigo the Friday after that. At a certain point, he really stops caring that Ben doesn’t think it’s fair for Lisa to make him rinse his dinner plate before meeting his friends on the front stoop.

At a certain point, he starts thinking about his dad, if it was this hard when he and Sam were kids. If it was ever like this.

Somehow, he’s real hard pressed to think that it ever was.

.

“Hey,” Lisa smiles at him, coming through the back kitchen door with a yoga mat strapped over her arm, and a plastic water bottle in the opposite hand.

Dean looks up from where he’s sitting at the kitchen table, talking himself into not feeling guilty about putting Baileys into his afternoon coffee, and half-smiles, just the corner of his mouth into a small twist.

“Hey yourself,” He manages, tilting his head back as she kisses his forehead, one hand coming around to brace his shoulder from the thump it receives when her yoga mat swings around and bumps into him.

She stands up, still smiling, and nods her head at his coffee mug, the kitchen knives he was sharpening.

“You alright?” She asks, raising one eyebrow in a way that Dean knows she realizes he’s really, really not.

Dean licks his lips, and straightens in his chair a bit.

“Peachy, just, you know,” He gestures at the knives as he reaches for his coffee mug, speaking into it as he brings it to his mouth. “Wanted to have steak this week, s’all.”

To her credit, the look Lisa gives him is precarious at best.

“Alright.” Her smile falters a bit, and she lets her hand run down over his shoulder, across the nape of his neck before she retreats, walking away. “Just let me know what you need.”

Bowing his head into the lip of his coffee, Dean stares out through the window and into the yard, gaze trailing over the lawn Ben still hasn’t cut this week, the bike he’s haphazardly half thrown onto the path.

“You’ll be the first to hear,” He says to himself, pushing away from the table to get himself a refill from the carafe, and booze cabinet. 

.

He still dreams about Sam.

Lisa tells him he has post traumatic stress, and she may be right, but she also doesn’t know enough to diagnose his broken heart. He’s pretty sure she can see it, some days, hell he wakes up and can tell just when he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror.

He’s a broken man, now, and isn’t that funny, in the grand scheme of things. It’s in everything he does, he knows it. He thinks Ben can tell, too, kids were funny that way, picking up on all the little things you tried to hide. 

Most of the time, he can hide it. He can look away when it gets too hard to look forward, he can change the subject when Lisa tries to broach it, and he can change the channel when someone that looks too much like Sam comes on screen.

But the dreams, he wakes up talking, crying, body jerking in fear as he falls out of these sequences that are only replays of the last days they got to spend together. For all of the shit they got into, the things they did to each other and with each other and for each other, they should have had more time than the five minutes in-between the last demon milking and the minute Sam began chugging all of the home brew.

Dean is nothing if not resilient, and the world may owe him a lot of things, but most of all, it owes him a few more minutes with his brother.

Just one last minute with his brother might be enough.

.

“Dude,” Ben punctuates his one-word sentence by lobbing the DVD case across the room, and knocking Dean in the shoulder.

Startling, Dean picks up the case with one hand, and runs the other through his hair.

“Sorry, man,” He says, shaking his head, glancing over at where Ben is sitting in his sixty dollar shoes, forty dollar pants, and fifty dollar t-shirt, looking expectant as ever as he watches Dean back. “What was the question again?”

Ben snorts, and looks back to the TV.

“I was asking if you wanted to watch the extended cut, or the theatrical. I got the special edition, so it came with both.” The tone in his voice says that Dean should either know this already, or get on the DVD versions train, and quick.

Licking his lips, Dean turns the DVD cover over. _Night of the Living Dead._

“Your call,” He manages, jerking up from the couch cushions as the DVD case drops to the floor, and bounces across the carpet. “I gotta take a leak first.”

Dean hurries from the living room with all of the dignity a man with tears already in his eyes can manage.

.

Lisa doesn’t know that he’s taken up smoking again, but he needs something to do with his hands and it’s easier to get them on a pack of Marlboros than a real, respectable gun license and shooting range membership.

His hands are shaking, now, as he lights up, hiding under the lip of the porch in the backyard. It feels like he’s doing something wrong, explicitly so, a new dirty little secret to keep in the barrage he’s been wheedling since he was 13.

The first time he kissed Sam, they were hiding like this, a lot like this, in the dark.

It had been a dollar theatre, in New Mexico. They’d felt each other up to the gore of _Night of the Living Dead,_ and Dean still considered it one of the most romantic moments of his life. 

He kissed Lisa for the first time in daylight, with one hand up her shirt because they hadn’t been able to make it back to his car. That night, she’d told him she didn’t like smokers, her daddy had died from lung cancer.

Dean has always thought there were a lot worse ways for your father to die.

Now, he drags on his cigarette fiercely, eyes watering at the memories as he tucks the pack back under the top rafter of the bottom of the porch, right where Ben could find them if he ever bothered pulling out his skis, or any of the other sports equipment Lisa had bought him.

Sam had always been his secret, his big dirty secret he could never hide or conceal or pretend to not take part in. The hilarity in the fact that he has since been replaced with such a small, ineffectual little pack full of teenage boredom is not lost on Dean.

These days, Dean finds he has too much time to think about all of the little things he used to never care about at all.

.

Three days a week, he drives downtown to pick Lisa up from her year-old studio. 

Idling at one of the yellow painted curbs is about all the time Dean spends in the car anymore, too many memories, too many little things that leave him in a foggy state that’s harder to break than not.

Sometimes, if he tries hard enough, he can pretend to glance in the rearview, and still see Castiel in the backseat.

The things you never thought you’d miss, huh?

.

“Your brother,” Lisa hedges around the bar-be-que that night, idling at Dean’s elbow with a beer in one hand, and a bottle of hot sauce in the other.

Dean jerks as though he’s been burnt without meaning to, and almost drops his favourite roasting fork into the grill.

“Sorry,” He pretend laughs, shaking his head and trying to regroup by stabbing one of the steaks with his fork.

She studies his profile carefully, the warmth of the sun glowing over the crown of his head, obscuring the line of his brow and the beginnings of the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t be,” She replies, after a careful second. Her eyes flicker down to look at the way his hand is shaking, overcompensating around the fork. “Sam died, didn’t he?”

Dean steps away from the grill, closes the lid, and reaches for his beer.

“Lisa, don’t,” He warns, bringing the bottle to his mouth.

Without thinking, he takes a few long, tight gulps, eyes trained on the clear blue skies above the roof of her house.

“Please just tell me,” She pleads, both hands tight around the two bottles she’s holding, thumbs braced against the labels.

His jaw tightens at the thought, all of the muscles in his throat working and tightening, making it harder to breathe and talk and try not to let her know.

“He died the night I came here,” Dean tells her, carefully, meticulously, after a moment of hesitation that had his eyes watering just enough to show all of his tells. “That’s all you need to know.”

Lisa watches, helplessly, as Dean walks back through the kitchen patio doors.

.

She doesn’t think he’ll ever figure it out, but she knows him more than he realizes.

The night they first met, when she was teaching classes at the YMCA and barely getting by from paycheck to paycheck, he had rolled into town all high and mighty in his slick ride and dirty leather jacket.

Lisa had fallen in lust with him, then, in that James Dean kind of way. They had spent the weekend together, she never made it out of bed and he never got a chance to get back to that bar to find a Girl #2.

She bets he still doesn’t realize he talks about Sam when he sleeps.

He did it the first night they spent together, in the three hours of sleep they had managed to procure in-between rounds that had her bent up against the headboard, and then over the bathroom sink. It wasn’t anything much, he had been so exhausted, but she’d heard him say Sam’s name, had watched his face in the dim of her bedside lamp.

For the first time that night, the façade had faded. His mouth had half-turned up into a sloppy, give-everything-away sleep smile that only came with the kind of dream that featured the love of your life.

At the time, Lisa had figured she’d been the rebound to some great love that perhaps had spanned over the last five years.

The last thing she expected was to be the fallback to Dean’s actual greatest romance, and maybe upon principal, the one that was doomed to fail from the start.

Lisa watches him while he sleeps now, how he’s tense even as he dreams, hiding his face away from her, angled towards the window and door, like he’s waiting for something, someone who isn’t her.

Ben tells her he reminds him of the war refugees they’re talking about in History, but god, Lisa thinks, the damage that she sees in Dean’s face, in the lines of his skin and the purse of his lips when he murmurs to Sam in the middle of the night…

She thinks that maybe if Dean had only been a soldier for the government, he would have been far luckier than the road taken.

.

Dean gets a job fit for a grease monkey just after the two month mark.

It isn’t easy to secure anything with nothing to put on a resume and no job skills beyond personal experience and lying, but Lisa puts in the good word for him through a friend of her brother’s, and before he knows it, Dean is a shop boy working 8-3, four times a week.

The shop reminds him of Sam and Bobby and their father. He uses the same product he used to hustle to use on his own wheels, he books appointments for little hot heads with sweet rides that he might have been in a previous life.

He thanks Lisa for taking care of him, and he gives her brother a handshake the next time he sees him over dinner and a beer.

Dean puts his head down, and tries to make everything work.

It’s what his father would have wanted, and it’s what Sam made him promise.

.

Lisa still goes out with her girlfriends every Thursday night. It’s been a tradition since college, and Ben and Dean seem content enough to sit at home with a movie and the DVD player without her.

She hasn’t introduced any of them to Dean yet, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.

“Bring him out next time,” Alma tells her, licking the salt from the rim of her raspberry margarita. “Ooh! I’ll bring Dave, we can double-date.”

Offering a tight, smile, Lisa glances up from her drink, and raises one eyebrow.

“He’s still in a bad place,” She manages to say, realizing that even though she doesn’t want to give anything personal away, Dean still hasn’t offered her much. “And he definitely isn’t belligerent enough to deal with you, yet.”

Alma rolls her eyes, and throws the tiny plastic stir stick across the table.

“You’re hedging,” Claire grins, looking up from the small screen of her cellphone for the first time that night. “What’s wrong with him, anyway? Some kind of deformity? It’s alright, we won’t stare.”

Making a face, Lisa shakes her head, and answers, “He’s not deformed, Claire.”

“Then what is it?” Alma intercepts, looking far too involved in the conversation for someone of her typical curiosity. “Lisa, you knew your last guy six hours before you introduced us, last time.”

Lisa smirks, and replies, “I was drunk, and we were at a bar.”

“Jesus, this guy must be _broken_ ,” Claire says, shaking her head as she goes back to her cellphone, thumb rolling the track pad with a certain rhythm.

Reaching for her drink, Lisa raises her eyebrows, and sighs, “You have no idea.”

.

In the dark of Lisa’s bedroom, Dean lays under the covers, and thinks of Sam.

.

_hey sweetheart, coming home now_ , Lisa texts Ben around midnight, knowing he’s up watching channels he shouldn’t be, and that Dean hasn’t charged his phone in weeks. _Do me a favor and make sure the front door is unlocked, the light is out again._

Dropping her phone back into the front pocket of her handbag, Lisa waves to Alma over the roof of her car, unlocks the door, and climbs in.

.

The mixed noises of Ben alternatively thumping around his room and channel surfing fast enough for Dean to get vertigo is what wakes him out of the thin veil of sleep he’d actually managed to initially dupe himself into.

Sighing, he tightens the bundle of bed sheets he already has tightened around his hands, rolls over in the bed, and opens his eyes to the empty stretch of mattress beside him.

He used to bitch and moan about Sam hogging all the pillows. Didn’t matter whether they were 16, 24 or 30, Sam was a pig for blankets and pillows, and it was a well established fact that motels charged more for extra.

Licking his lips, Dean shifts himself across the bed a few inches, until he’s balanced precariously at the edge, with only the furthest split of pillow hugging the curve of his face.

If he closes his eyes, and lets himself get drowsy enough, he can almost sleep-lie to himself, and pretend that Sam is still beside him, behind him, laughing open mouthed into the curve of Dean’s skull about all of his well spoken bad bed manners.

Dean supposes Sam never really cared for personal space when sleeping. He always said it was easier to keep you close, that way.

.

Lisa pushes the garage door opener again.

“Great,” She sighs, after the door in front of her, unsurprisingly, does not open. Dropping her hand from the steering wheel, she cranes her neck to look at the living room windows. 

All of the lights are off, which means Ben and Dean have both gone to bed. Ben also hasn’t responded to her text, which means he might _actually_ be asleep. And god help you if you successfully rouse a teenage boy from slumber.

Frowning to nobody in particular, Lisa pulls forward all the way, throws the car into park, and eases the emergency break on. She wonders if Dean ever did any electrician work, because it’s pretty clear they’ve got some kind of short happening out here.

Lisa grabs her purse off of the passenger seat, and gets her house key ready on the off-chance that Ben has actually gone to sleep, or forgotten to unlock the front door.

She’s out of the car and at the edge of the driveway when she drops her purse, startled, and almost trips as she takes an involuntary step backwards.

“Please don’t,” Lisa says without thinking, these two scared words that tumble out of her mouth before her brain can properly assess what’s happening to her.

Sam almost seems as startled to see her as she is to see him; his eyebrows jerk, and one hand falls out of his pocket.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” He says quickly, abrasively. Like it’s something he knows he isn’t very convincing at. Then he pauses. “You’re Lisa.”

Heart thundering against the inside of her chest, Lisa says, “Sam.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t think you…” He pauses, and then laughs awkwardly, one hand going to the back of his neck. “Usually you’re home before ten on Thursdays, I was late tonight, so I thought…”

Lisa studies him carefully, watching as his face jerks, like he’s fighting something.

“Dean told me that you died,” She tells him carefully, decisively.

Bending down, Sam picks Lisa’s purse up off of the grass, and holds it out for her, one finger hooked under the leather handle. 

“I did,” Sam tells her, watching as she reaches forward to jerk the bag away from him, bringing it back to hold close to her chest. His eyes flicker back to the house behind them. “I was, anyway.”

Lisa takes a step back toward her car. If she yelled, she bets Ben would hear her.

“You don’t have to be scared of me,” He tells her, sadly, noticing the slight shift in movement away from him.

All that Lisa notices is the tense pull in the muscles of his face.

“Just come back tomorrow,” Lisa says, trying to keep her voice as strong and clear as she can make it. She saw an abduction special on Oprah three weeks ago, and she still remembers all of the tips. “I’ll tell Dean you’ll stop by.”

Sam doesn’t follow her. He shakes his head and puts his hands in his pockets.

“Please don’t tell him?” When he looks up, he’s doing it from underneath the curl of his hair, forehead wrinkled with his request. “I made him promise me something, something he’d break if you told him. So please, don’t.”

Hesitating, Lisa pushes her own hair back behind one ear.

“What did he promise you?” She asks, and, in the dark quiet of the driveway that is hers and very much not Deans, she knows without being told.

Everything she needs to know is right there in Sam’s face.

“Just take care of him,” Sam says, instead, a real pro at dodging questions, just like his brother. “I won’t bother you anymore, but I need you to promise me that.”

Lisa’s eyebrows knot as she frowns, both arms crossing over her chest, purse tucked carefully between.

“I promise,” She says quietly, gaze flickering over Sam’s face.

Sam smiles at her, this brief, tight pulse of a smile that hardly counts as one at all, and then lets his gaze trail up to the house. Lisa follows his line of eyesight until she’s looking up at her own bedroom window, darkened, quiet.

Her blood runs colder at the realization, and she turns back to Sam, mouth already opening in phrase to her question.

Really, after everything, it shouldn’t be a surprise to not see Sam where he was standing a moment ago. To only see the overgrown, two inch too high lawn that Ben promised he would cut last week.

But it is. And for one, palpable moment, Lisa’s stomach clenches with so much hurt for Dean, that her eyes water.

.

_and my branches_  
are waiting  
for you like arms  
my branches  
are waiting  
for you. 


End file.
